


Simplistic Clarity

by mismatched_ideas



Series: You're a Song [2]
Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magic, Best Friends, Childhood Friends, Fighting, First Kiss, Friends to Lovers, Getting Together, Injury, M/M, cutie boys
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-10
Updated: 2018-08-10
Packaged: 2019-06-25 09:19:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,218
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15637776
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mismatched_ideas/pseuds/mismatched_ideas
Summary: When you’re a child, things seem so much easier. Friendship, family, the world—it’s all so much easier. There's just not much going on that can confuse you.





	Simplistic Clarity

When you’re a child, things seem so much easier. Friendship, family, the world—it’s all so much easier. There's just not much going on that can confuse you.

“Iwa-chan, you’re too slow!” Oikawa shouted from the top of the tree they were climbing. “Hurry up.” 

“You need to be more careful!” Iwaizumi responded from about halfway up the tree. 

“You need to be less careful,” Oikawa shouted back, getting his footing on the largest branch he could find and pulling himself all the way up so he was above the treeline. 

From up here, Oikawa could see the nearby city where he wanted to live when he was older. He could easily see the barely-a-city city where he and Iwaizumi lived. 

A city only in name, it felt like the middle of nowhere to Oikawa who, at nine and a half, felt pulled to bigger things and places. 

His and Iwaizumi ’s hometown sat on the edge of a vast forest where the boys had grown up playing. They were neighbors and their mothers had been best friends since high school so the boys had grown up together; sometimes like brothers, occasionally as enemies, and always as best friends. 

“Iwa-chan, get up here!” Oikawa shouted. “You can see forever!” 

It wasn’t their first time seeing this view, but it always blew Oikawa away. The fresh air. The kilometers of vision. Everything was perfect up here.

“I’m here, I’m here,” Iwaizumi grumbled as he tried to find his footing at the top. 

Once he peeked above the tree, though, he was drawn in too. This tree was one of the tallest in the forest and it stood on a hill, giving them a truly spectacular view. 

“Let’s move to the city one day,” Oikawa said because he always said that.

“We’ll see,” Iwaizumi responded because that’s always what he responded.

“What do you think it’s like? Living in the city?”

“Crowded.” It honestly wasn’t even that big of a city, it was simply bigger than theirs. “Loud. Dirty.”

“You're such a grump,” Oikawa pouted, the look not phasing Iwaizumi. 

“And you’re an airhead.”

“I’d rather be an airhead than a grump.”

“And I’d rather be a grump,” Iwaizumi replied. “Now let’s get down. If we don’t head back now, we won’t get back before dark.”

“You sound like such a mom,” Oikawa complained.

“That’s because our mom’s said if we missed curfew again, they were going to ground us for a month.” 

“Fine, let’s go I guess.”

Iwaizumi didn’t respond, simply heading back into the tangle of branches that made up the upper canopy. Just as Oikawa had made his way back into the same tangle, he heard the loud snap of a branch he was so familiar with thanks to his years of climbing trees. But he didn’t feel the accompanying stomach drop that foretold your drop. 

In only a few seconds, his mind realized the reason for the snap.

“Hajime!” He shouted as he watched his friend drop from sight. 

It all happened so fast and yet slow. Oikawa saw Iwaizumi start to fall and he realized they were so high—too high–and that this was bad. Then, without thinking, his ability called out to the tree and his magic spiked.

Elsewhere, Iwaizumi was aware that he was falling and that he’d be lucky to survive this. Then he was hitting branches. So many branches. Too many branches. They hurt like hell but he was also aware that his fall speed was going down. But he didn’t know where all these branches came from. IT didn’t make sense. There weren’t this many branches before.

Soon enough, though, he hit the ground and stopped worrying about the tree. He hit hard, pain shooting through his left arm. But he was alive and when he rolled onto his back, he saw Oikawa descending the tree much faster than seemed possible without falling. Iwaizumi swore the branches were moving to create stairs for Oikawa to descend. That didn’t make sense, though, since trees couldn’t do that. 

“Hajime!” Oikawa shouted, running to him. “Are you alive?”

“Yeah,” Iwaizumi responded, sitting up painfully. “But I think I broke my arm.”

“Can you walk? We need to get home. My mom can help.”

“Oikawa-kun, calm down. I don’t know what happened but the tree broke my fall.” He looked up at the tree again. “Speaking of the tree, how’d you get down so fast.”

“That doesn’t matter!” Oikawa started to pull Iwaizumi to his feet. “We need to get you home.”

“Calm down,” Iwaizumi repeated as he got to his feet. “It’s not that bad.” 

“That’s just the adrenaline, we need to get home before it wears off.”

Iwaizumi didn’t know what to do with Oikawa’s anxiety. He was used to him being the one worrying–Oikawa was accident prone–and yet he didn’t know how to deal with this reversal. 

“It’s okay, let’s just take it slow.”

“Yeah, okay,” Oikawa agreed, taking a breath before smiling at Iwaizumi.

They both took a step but then Oikawa stopped, swaying before collapsing. This time, it was Iwaizumi's voice that rang through the quiet forest, young and fearful and so, so helpless.

“Tooru!”

\---

Iwaizumi was sitting in a patch of bushes protected from sight when he heard the search party. Oikawa was still passed out and had been for a while now. 

Iwaizumi had initially tried to carry Oikawa home, but he was down one arm and–like Oikawa had predicted–in a lot of pain. As night fell, he decided to just find somewhere safe for them to stay until someone realized something was wrong. He’d expected that realization to come hours after sunset, but it was maybe half an hour passed sunset when he heard the voices close by.

“Hajime-kun! Tooru-kun!” 

“We’re here!” Iwaizumi shouted. “We’re here!” 

Familiar faces appeared, relief on their faces. One was a neighbor of theirs–Inoue Masahiro–and the other was the principal of their elementary school–Saito Yasunori.

“Thank goodness,” Inoue sighed. “Are you alright?”

“I think my arm is broken,” Iwaizumi told them, his calmness starting to fade now that they’d been found. “But Tooru isn’t waking up. He was fine but then he just fell down. I tried to carry him back my arm hurts too much.”

“Don’t worry, Hajime-kun, he’ll be alright,” Saito assured him with a smile. “He just tired himself out. What happened? Did you fall out of a tree?”

“How’d you know?”

“Just a guess,” Saito said, picking up Oikawa while Inoue picked up Iwaizumi. “But don’t worry, he’ll wake up once he gets a little more rest. You should get some rest too.”

Iwaizumi wanted to argue, wanted to say he’d stay awake until Oikawa woke up, but the quiet rhythm of the men’s footsteps quickly pulled Iwaizumi into the darkness of sleep. 

\---

When he woke up, Iwaizumi found Oikawa asleep in a chair, half sprawled onto the end of Iwaizui’s bed. 

Iwaizumi had briefly woken up while they set his arm. Even with the pain of that, he was so exhausted that he fell asleep the moment he was laid in bed. 

“Oikawa-kun!” Iwaizumi exclaimed, waking the other boy with a start. His hair was a mess and there were bags under his eyes, but he looked generally okay. “You’re awake!”

“That’s my line,” he answered smoothly, his face giving away his relief. “You slept for, like, twelve hours.”

“Really?” He didn’t expect that. “Wait, when did you wake up?” 

“I don’t know, maybe a few hours ago.”

“What happened? You just, like, fell over.”

“Well…” Oikawa looked torn but Iwaizumi had no clue why. “Let’s wait for our moms.”

“Are you sick?” Iwaizumi asked. “Are you dying?”

“No, idiot, it’s nothing like that.”

“Then what is it?”

“I’ll explain later.”

“I want to know now.”

“Ask your mom—”

“Tooru, what is going on?” Iwaizumi clenched his teeth for a moment before continuing. “You’re worrying me.” 

“IT’s not an easy thing to explain,” Oikawa told him, his voice quieter than Iwaizumi had ever heard it. “I wouldn’t even know where to start.”

“So what?” Iwaizumi crossed his arms–awkwardly because of his cast–and leveled Oikawa with a firm stare. “I watched you fall over for no reason and I want to know why.”

Oikawa’s eyes wandered to a small potted plant he’d given Iwaizumi for his last birthday. Soon their birthdays would be back but it didn’t feel like a year since either one of them had turned nine. Ten seemed so much bigger. 

“Oikawa—”

“Watch,” Oikawa interrupted, his eyes still glued on the plant. 

Iwaizumi followed his eyes and looked at the plant. It had been flowering when Oikawa first gave it to him but it hadn’t since then. He thought maybe it wouldn’t bloom until June. More likely, though, he was just bad with plants. 

For a few seconds, nothing happened. Just when Iwaizumi was going to ask what he was looking at, his door opened and both their moms appeared. 

“Tooru, what did I say?” Oikawa Rie looked more annoyed than Iwaizumi Mei, but that was nothing new. Maybe it was because Tooru was more of a troublemaker than Hajime or maybe it was because Mei had a much cooler personality. 

“He’s was being pushy!” Oikawa complained, confusing Iwaizumi further. 

“We expect you to respect our choice.”

“Why is it your choice?”

“We’re your parents.”

“Whatever,” Oikawa said, standing and leaving the room in a huff. “See you later, Iwa-chan.” 

“What’s going on?” Iwaizumi asked, already feeling like he wasn’t going to get a straight answer.

“Hajime, we’ll explain fully when you’re older,” Mei informed him. “But sometimes if Tooru-kun isn’t careful, he can tire himself out.”

“Is he dying?”

“No, he isn’t dying.”

“Then why did he fall over like that?”

“It’s just… sometimes Tooru-kun wears himself out.”

“So it’s because we climbed that tree?”

“No—”

“Yes,” Rie interrupted. “He tired himself out then got stress over your fall. It combined to make him pass out.”

“So he’s okay now?”

“Yes, he’s fine.” Rie smiled at Iwaizumi. “Now, I know you’ve been sleeping for a while, but I think you need more rest.”

“Okay,” Iwaizumi responded as the adults smiled and left.

“Rest well, Hajime-kun.”

“Yes, Oikawa-san.”

Alone, Iwaizumi was left with one thought repeating in his mind.

He would stay by Oikawa’s side forever and he’d make sure he never overworked himself again. 

\---

Falling in love with your best friend is hard. Well, the falling was easy, it was the outcome that was usually difficult. 

Iwaizumi realized quite suddenly that he had a crush on Oikawa. They were in class–history, one of Oikawa’s favorites even though he hated the teacher–and Oikawa turned around to say something to Iwaizumi.

“Oikawa-kun,” Tanaka Yuki said, annoyed with Oikawa like usually. “If you have something to say, you can tell the class.” 

Oikawa stood and even though Iwaizumi couldn’t see his face, he was sure Oikawa was smiling. 

“I’m sorry, Tanaka-sensei, I just wanted to know why you said The Falk War started in 1953 when it actually started in 1950 and ended in 1953?”

“Oikawa-kun, if you’re going to mouth off, you can stand in the hallway.”

“Does it count as mouthing off if I’m right?”

“Go to the hallway.”

Oikawa shrugged, turning to flash Iwaizumi a smile. It was a genuine smile of triumph because he knew he’d won. It was bright and maybe a little smug, but it was real and it made Iwaizumi’s heart skip a beat. 

That realization–that fall–had been easy. All he’d done was be enchanted like so many of their classmates were because while Iwaizumi could list all the things Oikawa was not, one thing he was was enchanting. 

But, the difficult part of having a crush on your best friend was never letting them know. And Iwaizumi was bad at that. He was lucky, though, because Oikawa was an idiot. That was the only explanation for how he never noticed the fact that Iwaizumi was always looking at him.

Or maybe he didn’t notice because he never turned to look back. Maybe he couldn’t see Iwaizumi staring because Oikawa didn’t have the time to spare to even glance back at Iwaizumi. 

Iwaizumi wanted so desperately for Oikawa to look at him too, but he was also terrified of it. What if he saw right through him? What if he didn’t? What if he did but he didn’t like what he saw?

So Iwaizumi was content to stand behind his best friend, eyes glue to him while Iwaizumi vainly hoped he’d turn around at look. 

He was content just to hold on to that smile for the rest of his life. 

\---

“How many time do I have to tell you not to overdo it, idiot?”

Iwaizumi and Oikawa were in their first year of high school but this was hardly the first time they’d had this argument.

“How many times do I have to tell you I’m not?” Oikawa shot back. Even if they’d had this conversation a lot, it was finally starting to get on Oikawa’s nerves. “I’m not nearly as fragile as you think I am!”

“I don’t think you’re fragile.” Iwaizumi hated that Oikawa would think that. “You just don’t know how to not overwork yourself!”

“When have I ever done that?”

“Do you want me to list all the times or just the highlights?”

“Fuck you, Iwaizumi-kun.” Oikawa didn’t really want to be this angry at Iwaizumi, but he found he couldn’t help it. He needed to stay at the top of his game. He needed to practice harder and longer. He needed to be the best. 

“No, fuck you!” Iwaizumi shouted back. “I had to watch you collapse when we were nine and in the middle of the woods just before dark.”

“You seriously still believe that lie about me exhausting myself by climbing a tree?” Iwaizumi couldn’t respond to that. “We’d climbed trees together plenty of times.”

“But the stress of my fall—”

“Yeah, that was stressful!” Oikawa sighed, finding that his anger was cooling quickly. These lies weren’t Iwaizumi’s fault. “Didn’t you ever wonder how you survived that fall with only a broken arm?”

“I— The tree—” 

“Yeah, the tree broke your fall. But how could there be that many branches in the way? Why were they all big enough to slow your fall but small enough not to do much damage?”

“I was lucky.”

“No, wrong, incorrect.” Oikawa grabbed Iwaizumi’s wrist and pulled him toward the door. Out in the summer heat, he pulled Iwaizumi to the dry grass slowly baking in the unusually hot summer. “The answer is magic.”

“Excuse me?”

Oikawa pulled him onto the ground, concentrating on the nearly dead grass. 

“Oik—”

“Watch.”

Iwaizumi did as he was told and watched as the yellow grass turned green and began to grow. His eyes widened, looking between Oikawa and the grass.

“Wha—?”

“Magic is real and plenty of people around here have it or know about it. Your mom and mine wanted to wait to tell you but I don’t know what they’re waiting for.”

“My parents—?”

“Non-magics–we call you Modes–but your mom knows about magic because of my mom.”

“My dad?”

“He doesn’t know.” Oikawa bit his lip, realizing that this had been stupid. “You can’t tell your mom I told you. My mom will kill me.”

“Magic,” Iwaizumi said, flopping onto his back to look at the clear sky. “Fuck.”

“It’s a need to know sort of thing,” Oikawa continued unnecessarily, lying down so their heads were next to each other but their bodies were facing opposite directions. “I just… I wanted you to know.”

Oikawa knew it was selfish. It had been Iwaizumi’s nagging that broke him but the biggest reason he’d been so easy to break was the searing fire in his stomach when he thought about Iwaizumi. He hated the feeling–it seemed like a betrayal of their friendship–but he still found himself dreaming Iwaizumi felt the same. And if he did he’d need to know about magic.

And maybe there was a part of him that thought this might make him interesting enough for Iwaizumi to look at him for just a little bit. 

“You saved my life?”

“Huh?”

“When I fell out of the tree.” Iwaizumi blinked. “You saved my life.”

“We don’t know you would have died.”

“I probably would have.”

“You would do the same.”

“Of course I would.” Iwaizumi frowned. “Don’t think this means I’ll stop watching out for you. You still overdo it.”

“Do not.”

“Do to.”

“Do not, do not, do not.”

“You’re such a kid.”

“So are you.”

Iwaizumi was quiet for a while before he spoke, quiet and soft. “Thanks.”

“What?”

“For saving me.”

“It’s nothing.”

“It’s not.” Oikawa could see Iwaizumi biting his lip. “If I wasn’t here then I wouldn’t be able to look at you.”

Oikawa turned his head, surprised to find Iwaizumi was looking at him. His face was serious and set, but his eyes were soft. 

“Huh?” Oikawa asked, laughing nervously. “What are you saying Iwa-chan?” 

“I’m saying that I like you, okay?”

“Where did that come from?” Oikawa asked, his voice on the edge of being shrill. “IF this is because I saved your life, I don’t—”

“It’s not that,” Iwaizumi interrupted. “I was just thinking about how I almost died and how if I died now I’d regret not telling you how I felt.”

“You’re not going to die.”

“I know.”

“I won’t let you.”

Iwaizumi smiled, reaching out a hand to touch Oikawa’s cheek. Oikawa wasn’t sure Iwaizumi had done anything so gentle since they were in preschool. 

“I know.”

All at once, the burning in Oikawa’s stomach got worse and he couldn’t keep it down anymore.

“Can I kiss you?”

Iwaizumi blinked, unaware up to this point that he hadn’t been rejected. Now, though, it was his turn to be flustered.

“What?”

“Can I kiss you?” Oikawa repeated. “Since you like me and I like you back.”

“You… like me too?”

Oikawa rolled his eyes, scooting a bit closer to Iwaizumi before craning his neck and pecking a kiss onto Iwaizumi’s lips. 

“Now do you believe me?”

“I, umm,” Oikawa nearly laughed at the redness of Iwaizumi’s face. “Well…”

“I’ll take that as a yes.” Oikawa leaned close to Iwaizumi, their lips nearly touching. “Can I kiss you again?”

Iwaizumi swallowed dryly before pressing forward, giving Oikawa a hard, messy kiss. 

“I’d like to say it’s about time, but I think I’ll have to go with get a room.” 

Oikawa and Iwaizumi shot up, Oikawa groaning when he found a smirking Hanamaki looking at them while an equally smug Matsukawa stood nearby.

“Now, now,” Matsukawa chimed in. “I think they’re cute. So, tell me, how were your first kisses, my chaste friends?” 

Iwaizumi buried his face in his hands and Oikawa sent a crude gesture in their friends’ direction, making them both laugh. But despite their embarrassment, Oikawa and Iwaizumi felt… happy.

When you’re a child, everything is more difficult. Friendship, family, the world–it’s so much harder. But, you always get older and you always grow up and the most important thing is that you always grow together.

**Author's Note:**

> Remember when I said that it would be a while before the next thing... well I got inspired to write this so here.......


End file.
